Office Computers Highly Vulnerable to Malware Attacks

Bit9, the desktop and web security company, has recently conducted a survey entitled "2010 What's Running on Your Users' Desktops?" according to which, organization networks are at risk of malware attacks. The study also discovered that government and enterprise desktops have substantial amount of unauthorized software as varied as Trojans, Chinese spyware, games and toolbars to ransomware and P2P software.

The survey, which questioned 1,282 IT officials, found that there wasn't an effective implementation of company policies. While 68% of the participants' companies followed software restrictions, 45% discovered unauthorized software causing infection to over 50% of their PCs.

Considering that there is a frequent overlooking of policies for software usage, it isn't surprising that merely 32% of the participants expressed confidence that their companies were safeguarded from damage on account of malicious or illegitimate software during 2010. However, Bit9 reports that IT security has fallen from 34% in 2009.

While remarking on the alarming outcomes of the survey, Tom Murphy, Chief Strategy Officer, Bit9, stated that they re-established the fact that organizations should adopt an increasingly positive approach to secure endpoints so that no malicious or unauthorized software downloaded or executed on their company networks, as reported by Cnet on May 26, 2010.

The Officer further stated that instead of struggling to deal with malware entailed loss of both money and time, the administrators made sure that merely authorized software should be used in their organizations. That was a crucial enterprise requirement that huge numbers of respondents handling malicious software on their networks confirmed, he added.

Apart from the factors just mentioned, the use of social-networking websites during work hours has been reported as a key cause of more-and-more malware assaults on organizations. For instance, during the 2nd and 3rd weekends of May 2010, Facebook suffered enormous phishing attacks, which led to the posting of malicious web-links on the pages of its users. Likewise, Twitter put a lot of efforts to maintain the safety of its members from phishing in spite of vast measures of security.

Related article: OFWs Warned against E-mail Address Stealing Phishing Scam

» SPAMfighter News - 6/5/2010